


Oatmeal

by Charon_the_Sabercat



Series: Friends and Food [3]
Category: Motorcity (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, The very 'broken home' feeling of meeting an adult sibling for the first time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:27:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27034177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charon_the_Sabercat/pseuds/Charon_the_Sabercat
Summary: It was kind of technically kidnapping, but it didn't bother Julie too much. She had been waiting a long time to meet Mike Chilton.
Relationships: Mike Chilton & Julie Kane
Series: Friends and Food [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1105704
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Oatmeal

She had him. Rogue cadet Mike Chilton, in the flesh, right in her hands. He had walked right up to her, basically offered himself on a silver platter, to do with as she wished. He had even done it right in the heart of KaneCo Tower, in the middle of the highest level security she had access to.

So why was she down here instead of back home?

Frankly Julie would have rather been back home. Mike Chilton had taken her all over the slums, all the while emptying out a stolen pod of also-stolen medical Kane Cubes. She had seen more broken houses, dirty children, and smelled more rank breath than she ever wanted to do again in her entire life, all while giving out those day-old Kane Cubes like they were little bars of solid gold. He only kept the final set of them for himself, and now he was offering them to-

Mike Chilton nudged the heavy iron door open with his shoulder, still balancing boxes of Kane Cubes in his hands. “HOME, back, have a girl with me, everybody okay?”

“Texas is-” and then someone coughed.

“It’s okay I have medicine!” Mike nodded Julie into the room. “Okay c’mon in, this is where I live.” He shouted back to the crowd. “GUYS THIS IS JULIE! Everybody who’s awake, say hi!”

Julie walked into the room feeling… naked, and plain. Everyone in Deluxe worn clean KaneCo whites, but here- where Mike Chilton lived- nothing matched with itself. Lights flickered and glowed purple on green floors cracked and patched with striped yellow and orange tape. Dotted blankets draped over plaid couches in front of a faded holoscreen. If she wanted to, she could probably put together every meal they’d had over the last couple days just from the strata of trash all over the floor. She tucked her shoulders. Julie was fourteen, clean, wearing white, and practically shining light like a racquetball target in the dirty den Mike Chilton called home.

Some of the blankets moved, and out of them popped an old man and a younger, healthier man.

The younger man pointed and laughed one long, tired laugh. “Mike brought home a giiiirl...”

The older man watched Julie carefully, suspiciously. She could feel his gaze probing her. It shouldn’t have been that intimidating, for an old man sitting in a recliner chair. “Hello, Julie.”

“Guys,” Mike stumbled over the words in stutters and twitches of his shoulders, fingers dancing on the boxes he carried. “Guys you wouldn’t believe. I go, I ask her where the medicine is, and she just- she knew! Not only told me, knew where the rest of it was-”

A flutter of panic came up from her throat. Like, she had figured Chilton was kind of a blabbermouth, because all of that was true, but if he spilled much more than that she could be in massive amounts of danger. She had to calculate- the young guy had tried to tease Chilton, maybe she could leverage that.

“OH, you know-” Julie giggled and hid behind the boxes she was carrying. “Can’t turn down a guy who’s crying.”

It worked beautifully. The younger guy started to guffaw, and Chilton’s ears went red.

“Mike brought home a cryyy...”

Chilton’s twitches turned into nearly spilling one of the boxes. “I was- it was just a freak-out! You’re dying of the flu! I was scared!”

The older man sighed, but it was a fond and grinning sigh. “Son, we’re not dying.”

“You don’t know that!” Mike wailed. “Like seven-thousand people have already died!”

“Wait, what?!” Julie finally staggered. “What do you mean? People don’t die from the _flu_!”

The younger man said, “Ohp. Deluxe baby. Lemme smell her pits.”

“ _ **What-?**_ ”

Mike got behind her and started pushing her into the room with his shoulder. “OKAY we’re gonna unpack that sentence WAY later! Julie, that’s Texas, don’t take it personally, he’s just like that, even with me.”

“Um-”

“Look just give him a box.”

“Sure!” Julie dropped her boxes onto Texas’s… body part. It was tricky to tell what was which part of him under a blanket, but the winded huff of pain he made when the box made contact was enough for her. “There you go!”

The shoving continued, only stopping when Julie was right in front of the old man. “Julie this is Jacob, he’s my new dad, give him this box, I’m gonna go check on Chuck!”

Mike Chilton escaped her in a rush of limbs after dropping all but one box into her hands, and Julie was left alone with Jacob. She had to think. Just one old man, one who had the flu. She should be suspicious of that. Nobody got the flu anymore. That might just be a cover story. Chilton might have been manipulating her… Maybe Jacob was manipulating Mike, too, because those tears back home looked genuine enough. Should she try talking to the guy?

Julie started by delicately laying the boxes on his lap. Jacob, for the little time she spent considering, unwrapped his arms from his loud blanket and worked steadily at opening the box on top. “Nice to meet you, by the way. Julie…?”

“Kapulsky,” she finished. “I-I’m an intern. Mike caught me on my lunch break an-”

“Hey hey, relax. This isn’t an interrogation.” Jacob fussed at the box. “Damn my brittle old nails… You don’t have a pocket knife on you, do you, Julie?”

“Wha- me?” Julie startled. “No! I don’t carry a _knife_.” The phrase “What do I look like, some Motorcity thug?” jumped to the tip of her tongue, stopped dead in its tracks, and retreated back down her throat before she had a chance to say it.

“Oh well, can’t blame me for trying. Texas, you have yours?”

Texas punched a box in and pulled out a handful of Kane Cubes. “Knives are for the weak.”

“Yeah, well, I’m the weak.” Jacob tossed Texas his box.

Actually Jacob just kind of tossed the box and it landed at his feet on the floor.

“Oop.” Jacob wrapped himself back up. “Sorry, Julie, could you get that for me?”

“M- me?” Julie stalled. “Um-”

“No worries, sudden girl!” Texas rolled around under his covers until he was sitting upright. “Texas will serve the… serve the stuff to… wait...”

Texas was this very short, but very buff little man… and he was shivering. Shaking so hard she could see the ripples in the fabric draping from him, hard enough to make his voice tremble. He swelled up in pride and deflated without completing a sentence, and he collapsed back on top of his box of medicine without so much as a heavy breath. His head and hands retreated back into his blanket in silence.

“Are… you two? Okay?” Julie felt the need to put a few steps between herself and Jacob. “Like… for real?”

Jacob cleared his throat with a wet, painful cough. “Tell you the truth? No, I feel like shit and Texas probably feels worse. He’s been sick for a week.”

“That’s crazy!” Julie shouted. “Why didn’t you get your Kane Cube-”

Oh wait.

Jacob chuckled. “Hard to get your yearly flu vaccine when you live in Motorcity.”

Things started making sense. That’s why Mike wanted so many. That’s why he was so ecstatic when she mentioned that the “expired” dosages in the trash collection wing were still, technically, perfectly viable. Even why he would give so many to what looked like only a few people… if everyone else was sick at home, they would send the healthiest one out to get the medicine.

And theirs was Mike.

“Chuck’s okay!” Mike announced to… just, the room, instead of anyone in particular. He spilled out of the hallway in a relieved flurry of arms. “Everybody take their cubes?”

Jacob announced plainly, “I can’t get mine open.”

Texas wailed under his blanket.

“Jacob uh-” Julie pulled at the seams of her jumpsuit. “Needs a pocket knife?”

“On it!” Mike bounced over the back of the couch and scooped up the box on the floor in one solid motion. He hovered over Jacob’s shoulder like he was about to start surgery. “You don’t even need a knife to open this, it’s perforated! I told you- I told you! Dying!”

The words seemed less sincere when Jacob repeated, “Mike, I’m not going to die.”

“No one thinks they’re going to!” Mike worried. He only ripped the perforations open during the pauses in his words. “I mean, unless they like… actually know, I guess- stop making me think about it!”

Texas struggled in his blankets. “Need… need cowbell...”

“No, Texas,” said Mike. “You do not need cowbell.”

“ _But you fear the reaper_!”

Julie had to ask. “What the hell is he talking about?”

Mike dropped two cubes- a flu vaccine dose- into Jacob’s hands. “I have no idea. Jacob, take your medicine.”

Jacob smiled like an asshole. “Don’ wanna.”

Mike nearly pulled at his hair in another freak-out. “ _What do you_ _ **mean**_ _you ‘_ _ **don’ wanna’**_ _?!_ ”

Jacob, and a hidden Texas, shared a laugh, and Julie wasn’t really sure whether she wanted to join them or not. It seemed so mean. Mike Chilton had gone to Deluxe for them- he’d risked getting caught for their sake! She was about to-

No, actually, she had made her decision.

“Hey! Grow up!” snapped Julie. The laughter cut off quick, and she let the words carry her through it. “You laugh, but Kane caught us in the act! Mike nearly got blown up trying to get this for you!”

“You got caught?!” Jacob spluttered.

Mike’s hands were a blur as he started explaining. “Yeah, I didn’t even GET to that part! He caught us leaving the garbage unit, and you know it’s not really him, it’s security cameras and Kane Bots, but the instant I said ‘I have someone with me’ he whipped out giant cannons and tried to blast us both!”

Texas’s head peeked out from the blankets. “Woah. Badass.”

“How did you get Sasquatch all the way to Deluxe?!”

Mike faltered. “OH uh… didn’t take Sasquatch, that’s how, I uh… took the new car.”

Jacob looked aghast. “What- Mike that car’s not finished yet!”

“I know! That’s why Deluxe sensors didn’t pick it up!” Mike’s explanation took on a bit of a manic edge. “It was perfect!”

“Did you at least install the windshield?”

“Oh yeah, yeah!”

“And power steering?”

“Yes!”

“… and the brakes?”

“Take your medicine, Jacob.”

“Mike Chilton-!”

“HEY I have an idea!” Mike clapped his hands together. “FOOD! Food is a good idea! Medicine goes down easy with food!”

Texas gave a thumbs up. “Food is the best idea ever.”

A weak voice sounded out from the hallway. “I could eat.”

“CHUCKLES!” Mike leaped to jump over the couch again, barreling into the tall lanky blond boy hiding under a thick blanket in the hallway. They hugged like magnets. “Buddy jeeze I told you to stay in bed but I don’t wanna let go...”

All this Julie watched, and carefully, and thought on things. This was Cadet Mike Chilton, pride of the KaneCo Academy. This was who she’d read reports on over her father’s shoulder since she was a little girl. He aced every test. He mastered all physical training. This was her father’s treasure among the Deluxe rabble, the “best product he’d ever produced”.

This was who her father promised her she would meet someday, any day now, when the time was right. When Chilton was ready, he would take Tooley’s place as her father’s right hand man. He could finally be part of her every day life, and she could see him and talk to him and get to know him for real.

This was the person her father had stopped acknowledging three months ago. The traitor. The coward. The un-person.

A teenager who talked with his hands, cared too much about everything, and openly called this smelly old man ‘his new dad’.

“CHUCK-” Mike dug his hands into Chuck’s bangs and pulled them out of the way. “Oh you’re burning up buddy let’s sit you back down- Chuck this is Julie! She helped save your life today!”

“I guess I did!” Julie waved. “Hey, Chuck.”

Chuck waved back. “Hi Julie. This one’s… this one’s real, right?”

“Hey,” said Mike. “You’re not hallucinating this one. She’s a real girl.”

“Okay...” Chuck whimpered. “Okay… ‘cause I’m not wearing anything under this blanket.”

“SO, JULIE,” said Mike, “Wanna help me make dinner?!”

“YES PLEASE,” said Julie with no hesitation whatsoever. “LET’S DO THAT. OVER SOMEWHERE ELSE.”

She just took off in a random direction before Mike came up behind her, caught her arm, and lead her into a different part of the building. It was so weird here, how everything where they lived was just… out, all the time. Furniture tucked back into her pod whenever it wasn’t in use. She could go for days without ever seeing her food cube dispenser, depending on how often she ate at Claire’s or her dad’s office. But here, all the doors and drawers and little jars made her attention span fizzle out, and she waffled in the kitchen for a few embarrassing seconds before she caught sight of Mike doing the exact same thing. His hands spun in little circles, and she could almost see the loading progress bar stalling out in his head.

“Uuuh… okay full disclosure: I learned to cook three days ago when Jacob got too sick to leave his chair,” Mike explained. “And that was only instant noodles and soy milk, aaand I ate the last of that before I left so this might take a while-”

“Hey,” Julie interrupted. “Like, you know it’s okay, right? You don’t have to explain stuff to me or, like, tell me absolutely everything! I mean-” Julie pulled at her jumpsuit again. “You know? ‘Deluxe baby’?”

She got the same sort of stalled out look again for a few seconds, before Mike very theatrically shrugged. “So? _I’m_ a Deluxe baby, and you trusted me!”

“That’s like- different? Though?” Julie threw her hands up. “I don’t know!”

“I don’t know either!” said Mike. “All I know I put my trust in you, and you didn’t let me down! And now my family’s gonna be okay, and I know how to stop a car with no brakes! That’s a pretty rad skill!”

“ _Rad_??”

“Just- Dude I don’t even know!” Mike combed his fingers through his bangs. “I really don’t… this has been a weird week. I’m sorry you got pulled into it-”

“No no! Don’t apologize for that part,” said Julie. “Really. I think I know more about Motorcity now than anybody else in Deluxe… You like it down here? With Jacob and Chuck and… _Texas_?”

The sound of his voice asking to smell her armpits still lingered in the back of her mind.

But Mike glowed when he smiled, and he immediately answered. “Motorcity is the coolest. Everything here is just… free! You wear what you want, do whatever you want with your free time, learn whatever you want to learn- you don’t even have to make your bed if you don’t want to! Do you know how nice it is to wake up in the morning and know that whatever you do, it’s exactly what you want to do?”

“I...” Julie wasn’t sure how to answer that. “Guess… not?”

“And the food!” Mike jolted. “OH right we’re supposed to be cooking- okay help me look for stuff. Damn it I don’t know how to make zucchini bread- I-”

And just as soon as he started, he stopped, hand halfway in a cabinet. “Oh… I didn’t ask. You don’t wanna… stay? Do you?”

“Like…” Julie could kind of feel her gut tying in a knot. “The night?”

He didn’t make it easy. He turned and met her eyes, full height, not intimidating just… tall. And there, unable to be ignored or denied. “No, like… in Motorcity. Like I do.”

“Oh…” Julie sighed. “No… my dad’s still up there. He’d be really upset if I left and didn’t tell him.”

She was expecting something more painful, or more of a fight, but Mike just lost a little energy and sighed. “That’s good of your dad, though. I’m glad he’s worried about you.”

“You didn’t leave any family behind when you left?” Julie asked. “I thought Jacob was ‘your _new_ dad’.”

“Yeah, well...” Mike shrugged and went back to the cabinet. “My old dad tried to shoot you in the head with a plasma cannon.”

“Oh...” There went the knot in Julie’s stomach, tying up hard and causing her actual physical pain. “ _Yikes_.”

“Whatcha think?” said Mike. “Dinner, then I bring you home? Kane should have cooled his jets by then.”

By the time dinner was cooked, Chuck had put on actual clothes and joined everybody in the main room with the couches. Mike and Julie split up the bowls for serving everyone, and when it was time to sit down, Julie wedged herself between Mike and the couch armchair. Mike moved to make room for her, snuggled shoulder-to-shoulder with Chuck.

“Look at that!” said Jacob. “You figured out the oatmeal.”

Chuck swirled his fork around in the boiled oats and lifted it. The wet flakes stuck to the tines. “It looks like you sneezed in it.”

“That means it’s perfectly cooked!” said Jacob.

Julie moaned, “Eeeew! Gross!”

“Anybody got any jam?” asked Texas. “Jammin’ oatmeal is best oatmeal, hands down.”

Julie took a bite and agreed that it needed… something. Oatmeal was a sticky, hot, but flavorless mush that stuck to her tongue when she tried to chew it. It was easier just to swallow, but even that kind of slid down her throat weird and almost made her gag. “Waaagh...”

“Maybe hot sauce?” said Chuck.

Mike snorted around his mouthful of oatmeal. “What? You can’t put hot sauce on this!”

Chuck put on a sassy posture and waggled his shoulders. “Well how do you know? You ever try?”

“OO, and ham! Ham and oats!” Texas continued. “Jam n’ ham n’ oats.”

“Texas, you know I don’t allow meat in this house!” Jacob argued.

Nobody else was complaining, so Julie took another bite of oatmeal. Still kind of gross, and now it was getting cold almost instantly.

“So what you’re sayin’ is what I want-” Texas started to sway and snap his fingers around his spoon. “ _You got, but it might be hard to handle~_ ”

Mike checked Jacob once, one more time when he started arguing, and then snuck a little paper packet into Julie’s hand. He whispered low, “Put that in your oatmeal fast. It helps. Trust me.”

She moved automatically to the instructions. What came out of the paper was a kind of sticky, brown powder, and Mike snuck the paper away as quick as she could toss it. A quick twirl of her fork incorporated the odd foodstuff, and in a move that Claire would probably never forgive her for, she took a bite of the strange, unidentified sticky substance that a stranger told her to put in her food on the sly.

Sparkles of light went off in her vision at the pure, unadulterated sweet that lanced across her tongue, cutting through the sticky texture and giving the oatmeal real, powerful flavor. She took another fast bite, and the bland smoothness was a relief after the hit of the first one, and then the bite after that had even more of the brown stuff inside.

Chuck leaned over and whispered. “What’s she doing?”

Mike whispered back. “I snuck her some brown sugar from the diner.”

“Oo, Jacob’s gonna be mad. That stuff’s expensive.”

Mike sassed back, and leaned into Chuck with his elbow hard enough to tickle him, “Well who’s gonna tell him, Chuckles? Maybe I just make the best oatmeal in Motorcity. Ever think of that?”

She could get used to this. Motorcity did smell, and the people in it were kind of gross on the first impression, but there was some good down here. She polished off her bowl of oatmeal and didn’t ask to go right home. It was nice to sit on an ugly couch with warm, worn cloth instead of hard clean plastic. It was good to see the flu vaccine working near immediately, in true KaneCo fashion, to the point that Texas could get up and walk before she left.

The drive back to Deluxe was boring compared to all the crazy maneuvering Mike had to do on the way there. With the towers docked in their chargers for the night, they had to “park” bumper-first into a wall and then walk the rest of the way to ground level. Mike wished her goodnight, tousled her hair, and left for home.

She had done all of that, instead of calling her father. That had been her very first instinct, when she saw a frantic and tear-stained Mike Chilton dropping out of an air duct in front of her hiding place in the hallway. He looked like a criminal at that moment. A rough leather jacket, sweating, panicked, and definitely not supposed to be on the medical wing floor.

She nearly called Abraham Kane himself down on Mike Chilton.

But Mike Chilton saw her, in a hallway by herself, sitting on the floor with a little dessert Kane Cube and a card Claire gave her that morning.

And through the tears, through the heavy breathing, despite the break-in… Mike Chilton saw her, stopped, _smiled_ , and said “Hey! Happy birthday.”

When she automatically replied “Thanks” and followed it with “… are you okay?”, he just… spilled everything out all at once. His sick family, his little bit of knowledge of the medical wing, the security systems, the time limit… Mike had an entire city waiting for him to bring a miracle cure home, and he still stopped to smile at her and wish her happy birthday.

Julie went to bed that night without so much as seeing her father.

Tomorrow, she could wake up and do nothing. Her “internship” was mostly an excuse to have her stay in the tower while her father was working. She had no duties, no obligations, and nothing to answer to except her own empty pod and maybe a call from Claire, if she wasn’t busy with something else.

But no… tomorrow, she could get up and do exactly what she wanted to do.

She was going to find her way back to Motorcity.


End file.
